I’ve noticed that a lot of people from parts of the US who pronounce pin and pen the same way often say ink pen when talking about a pen, to avoid that confusion.
IM biased O:
Crawfish = pure South. Probably has cooked at least one
Crayfish = effete country club recor types, Northeasterners
Crawdad = other people all over (also the only one not in my tablet’s dictionary)
The shoe question was the hardest and I’m still not sure I did it right. It really depends on context. Some I’ve never heard of, some seem dated, three or four work for me.
Wow, that was poorly worded. What I mean is that the map showed highlighted triangle, formed by those three cities, which included my hometown. It’s not big enough to be on the map, otherwise.
See, I’ve always thought crawdad was the Southern one, specifically because it’s not in many dictionaries. I definitely feel like a hillbilly when I say it. But I feel the same way about “victuals” and “ornery.”
I’ve taken the quiz four times now and each time pegged me as a Sacramentan, with nearby cities as runners-up. I even changed a few answers where I might use terms interchangeably.
The weird part is that it keeps listing “fireflies” as being distinctive of Sacramento… when the damn things don’t even live out here! The only reason I know they exist is from visiting my grandparents in Ohio as a kid.
I’m British, and it put me in Yonkers, Fort Lauderdale and Miami which, looking back through, seems fairly common for the non-Americans taking the quiz.
Eh, nowhere close for me. Probably thanks to growing up in Albuquerque with parents who grew up in South Carolina and now living in upstate NY combined with some more academic answers. (For instance, the traffic circle/roundabout question was answered solely due to my experiences here.)
The term “hero” being highly localized didn’t surprise me nearly so much as the fact that another fairly entrenched term, “hoagie”, lives right next door and I’d never heard of it until quite late.
When I was 16, a lifelong family friend of mine who’s 2 years younger than me was visiting my house in Queens. I’d known him literally his whole life, and we saw each other once or twice a month on average, in NY or northern NJ (Morris County, near Parsippany or Livingston, NJ). I said I wanted to get some Italian food, but not pizza, maybe a meatball hero. He said he wasn’t in the mood for something hot (it was summertime), but he could go for a “hoagie”.
“What the hell is a hoagie?”
“It’s a sandwich… A long roll, like a foot long, with meat on it.”
“So, that’s a hero. Or maybe a footlong sub?”
“No, it’s different from a hero. That’s what you’re getting. Not a ‘sub’, either.”
“??? And … where would we get this? You wanna stop by the deli on the way back?”
“No, wherever you were going, right? An Italian place?”
“???”
It turns out that to him, a “hero” was for hot food with red sauce (meatball, chicken, veal or eggplant parmagian) on an elongated roll; a “hoagie” was (especially Italian) cold cuts and cheese and dressing on the same roll (salami, bologna, cappy ham, provolone, etc.); and a “sub” was one of those “party platter” type things that get cut up into one or two inch segments.
Pretty useful distinctions, actually. But it blew my mind that I could have such a “what the heck are you talking about” conversation with someone who lived less than an hour away from me, and who I’d known my whole life, and where I was almost as familiar with roaming his neighborhood as my own, about something as commonplace to me as everyday food.
I was born and raised in south Texas…according to the test, I got Des Moines, Akron and Detroit. Apparently I’m not a true Texan.
Chicago here. Don’t remember it being called “crawdad” ever. I seem to recall growing up with “crayfish,” but I answered “crawfish,” which I personally would have guessed is the most generic of the terms. “Crawdad” to me sounds much more dialectal than “crawfish” or “crayfish.”
Found one survey’s results here.
42% of Americans call it “crawfish.”
24% call it “crayfish.”
24% call it “crawdads.”
I live in very much the cool zone for “crawdad.” So my hunch about “crawfish” being the most generic is correct, but I’m a little surprised that “crayfish” is equally as popular as “crawdad.”
My 3 cities were Sacramento, Santa Rosa, and Oxnard. All in CA. I was born in the Bay Area, but have lived in Sacramento for 25 yrs.
Mine were Modesto, Fresno and Chattanooga. Well, at least it got the right state of Tennessee, just the wrong side. I’ve been told I talk like I’m from nowhere so that may explain pronounciation questions being skewed. The regionalisms apparantly got me pegged as southern.
#66 if anyone is looking. Actually, now that I think crawfish is used for the Cajun food, but crawdad is more common in my environment for the living animal.
Also #67 is an interesting one, and I think subject to many confounds. I learned that “daddy long legs” was a cellar spider, while this question asks the opiliones order, of which I have only seen one individual in my life, in California. And it was on the lawn, not in the spider’s normal garage habitat. I would call this non-spider arachnid a harvestman, and if you want to refer to the spider in that way, say “harvestman spider.” I honestly don’t think people usually get close enough to notice the number body segments, so they may be answering with a bias. The harvestman I saw was more vividly colored than a spider. Interesting little creatures.
When I tried to sanitize my answers to represent my upbringing, rather than items I’ve picked up as an adult (roundabout, crawdad, y’all, etc.), it gave me an incredibly tight grouping in downstate NY - very accurate.
Of course, if they really wanted to zero in on that area, they’d use “wedge” as one of the sub-sandwich possibilities. I think that’s a lot more regionalized and esoteric than “sneakers.”
Yes, “wedge” would pretty much place you in Westchester, maybe Rockland or Putnam.
I took the test twice, it gave me six different cities stretching from Baton Rouge to Chattanooga. I’ve never lived closer than 285 miles to any of those cities, and I’ve never even been to four out of the six.
I’ve lived nearly all my life in L.A., and it did come up with Fresno, Bakersfield, and – ah – Long Beach? That’s close enough, I suppose, but I have to wonder if the largest cities are excluded from the data. On the assumption that differences in dialect might tend to become watered down in those places, I can see why such a decision might have been made.
Interesting. I had my eleven year old daughter take it. She got Newark NJ (very close to where we’ve lived her whole life) but not NYC (where her father and I grew up). So IMO very accurate.
In my case, scary how accurate it was. The three suggestions were Washington, DC, Baltimore, Maryland, and Arlington, Virginia. The third is correct – also Washington is just across the Potomac River from Arlington, and Baltimore is nearby.
It missed by about 600 miles. It shows me as being from the New Orleans area. I’m a native Houstonian.